Piece description from the artist
Often times, Hubble images – though beautiful in their own right – are rendered rather dull and flat. For a more impactful fine art print, I like to slightly enhance these images to bring out the color and texture without disrupting the realism of the original.
The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched "wings" of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium.
Sharpless 2-106, Sh2-106 or S106 for short, lies nearly 2,000 light-years from us. The nebula measures several light-years in length. It appears in a relatively isolated region of the Milky Way galaxy.
A massive, young star, IRS 4 (Infrared Source 4), is responsible for the furious activity we see in the nebula. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the "wings" of our angel.
A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an "hourglass" shape. Hubble's sharp resolution reveals ripples and ridges in the gas as it interacts with the cooler interstellar medium.
Dusky red veins surround the blue emission from the nebula. The faint light emanating from the central star reflects off of tiny dust particles. This illuminates the environment around the star, showing darker filaments of dust winding beneath the blue lobes.
Detailed studies of the nebula have also uncovered several hundred brown dwarfs. At purely infrared wavelengths, more than 600 of these sub-stellar objects appear. These "failed" stars weigh less than a tenth of our Sun. Because of their low mass, they cannot produce sustained energy through nuclear fusion like our Sun does. They encompass the nebula in a small cluster.
The Hubble images were taken in February 2011 with the Wide Field Camera 3. Visible narrow-band filters that isolate the hydrogen gas were combined with near-infrared filters that show structure in the cooler gas and dust.
Adam Romanowicz is an award winning travel, landscape, and nature photographer with penchant for adventure.
Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Adam always had a fascination with the artistic and abstract world. Childhood days were spent drawing, building models, and daydreaming of adventures in far off lands. While the real world grounds him in a career of engineering, daydreaming evolved into a passion for travel, outdoors, SCUBA diving, flying, and other exhilarating activities. These passions only reinforce Adam's love of photography, allowing him to show others the world through his eyes.
Shooting the world since 1997, Adam strives to create a strong sense of place in his travel related photographs. The idea is to make the viewer feel that they are literally standing in the image rather than just looking at it. Other than travel, photo interests include aviation, underwater, and macro.
Adam's archival quality fine art prints can be purchased directly from this site, or his online galleries at <a href="http://AdamRomanowicz.com" target="blank">AdamRomanowicz.com</a> and <a href="http://3scape.com" target="blank">3scape.com</a>. Prints are available on paper, canvas, acrylic, and metal with a large variety of custom framing options. His images are also exhibited and sold in galleries and juried art shows around Chicagoland.
In addition to fine art prints, Adam offers a large collection of editorial and commercial stock photography. Stock images are available for license on this website. Published credits include: Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Harcourt School Publishers (educational books), Mondo Publishing (educational books & magazines), Newfoundland Gazette, various websites, calendars, cd covers, and store displays. His work was also used in set design for ABC's TV show Desperate Housewives, as well as on a TV spot in Sydney, AU.
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